How I Became Fluent in English WITHOUT Living in Another Country

hey everybody how's it going Chiago here and welcome to my podcast English with Chiago I am super excited because this is the very first episode of my newest podcast I'm launching this podcast now and I couldn't be happier about it I hope you are happy as well and excited because every week there will be one new episode here uh designed to take your English to the next level so I created this podcast with the intent of helping intermediate and advanced Learners of English who feel somewhat stuck forever stuck at the intermedia level I designed this

podcast to help you if you are in this situation I want to help you go to a more advanced level of English and communicate with more confidence more accuracy more sophistication and Clarity and of course more awareness all right so welcome and in this first episode I thought that a perfect topic to kick things off is telling you my story sharing with you my English learning Journey how I went from a complete beginner A1 level all the way to C2 level which is the last level a non-native speaker can achieve when it comes to Proficiency

in English and I did all that from my home country from Brazil I am Brazilian as most of you know uh those of you who already follow my work on YouTube and on social media so I come from Brazil and I didn't have to go abroad I didn't have to travel to an English speaking country I didn't have to go on an exchange program and stay months there to learn English I learned everything here in my home country in Brazil so today I'm going to be sharing a little bit of my story with you and

hopefully my story will give you some inspiration and also some ideas some insights of things that you can apply in your own English learning Journey all right before we start with today's episode I just want to remind you that I also teach privately I have uh some slots available on my calendar in the moment to uh get more private students so if you are interested in having private English classes with me online there's a link to that I'm going to leave the link in the show notes Here uh on Spotify Apple podcast or if you

are on YouTube the show notes will be in the video description right under the video uh it's very simple it's a page where you can go and then there you can learn more about how my private classes work and if it makes sense to you at the bottom of the page you have a short simple form for you to fill out basically it's a short application that you're going to submit and then I'm going to evaluate your answers your responses and if you are approved you can become my private student okay so if you are

interested I'm going to leave the link to that here in the show notes and in the video description on YouTube all right by the way this this is a um new podcast that I'm starting so let me ask you already to follow this podcast if you are on Spotify or apple podcast or anywhere else make sure you follow the podcast follow the show so you don't miss one single episode episode and if you are on YouTube of course don't forget to subscribe to the channel so you can follow the upcoming videos and episodes I I

will be uploading here on the Channel all right so on to my story so let me tell you a little bit about how I learned English and how I got to this level of proficiency and fluency that you hear me with today okay so as I told you already I come from Brazil and uh I started learning learning English for real at around 15 years old you see so I didn't start as a kid I started a little bit older I was a teenager already so up until 15 I knew zero English and I mean

zero for you to have an idea I was thinking about it the other day and I had this friend who used to live in the US back then he was a childhood friend and once I sent her a letter because back in those days um we used to you know exchange letters like written letters you know paper letters and uh she was living in the US and I wanted to be you know cool so I wrote the word please I don't know what what I was saying to her exactly I forgot now but I said

please but I remember that I wrote that word as p l i s please can you believe that so I ended up writing please you know uh this is just for you to have an idea of how my level was back then it was really bad I didn't know any English at all okay and uh I would say that I was just another statistic because unfortunately here in my home country here in Brazil this is actually common most Brazilians most people here don't speak fluent English as a matter of fact there is this um survey

these statistics that say that 95% of Brazilians know zero English absolutely nothing and out of the 5% left only 1% of Brazilians is actually fluent so only 1% is actually at the level that I am for example can you believe that and the other 4% are people hopefully like you who are at an intermediate level pre-intermediate intermediate and who are trying to get to a higher more advanced level so statistically speaking this is quite common here and I was just another statistic I was just another Brazilian who didn't know any English all right um but

then something funny happened when I was that age when I was 15 because for some reason I started to connect this idea of knowing English fluently speaking English fluently with having more success in my life or having more opportunities in my life for some reason I started to associate those two things I guess part of that reason part of that was because I looked around my Social Circle you know I looked at my parents my family members my friends from school I looked at the kids who lived on the same street as I did and

I realized that nobody spoke English at all nobody knew any English so almost like instinctively I thought okay if I want to stand out if I want to be different in a positive way if I want to be unique and if I want to have a better life or more or more opportunities in my life I got to know English I have to know this language I have to know how to speak this language how to use this language fluently um nowadays looking back I can tell you that that um I'm I'm glad that I

had this realization relatively young because I was 15 when I realized this you know nowadays I have um many private students who are adults already who are adult professionals and one of the things they tell me sometimes is they regret the fact that they realize the importance of English only later in their lives when they were already adults when they were already working then that's when when real that's when they realized how important English would be for them yeah but I'm glad to to tell you that I was able to get this realization relatively young

or early when I was 15 and uh I started to desire bilingualism you know I I I started to to want really want to become a bilingual person for some reason to me being bilingual uh meant having more opportunities having more success and it was something cool that I wanted to to to be you know to become I wanted to be able to use two languages very well so I chose Portuguese right my my native language as one of them and English as my second language so that's kind of how it started for me how

um I got the first motivation to start learning English but then of course um nothing in this life is 100% smooth right um life sometimes is not sunshin and rainbows as people say right so obviously I had some challenges along the way I had some obstacles so let me tell a little bit about some of the the obstacles that I faced when I decided at 15 that I wanted to learn English well the first obstacle that I can tell you here is the fact that I come from I don't come from a rich family when

it comes to money okay so obviously my parents couldn't pay for an English course back then you know uh I had some friends back then who were enrolled in language courses they took English at school uh some of them even have private teachers who went to their homes to teach them but uh that wasn't my reality so I didn't have any of that and I also went to a public school here in Brazil so the English that is taught in public schools here is really really bad to be honest you know the quality of Education

in that department is really um deficient so I had to learn The Language by myself so I decided that I was going to do whatever it took to learn English on my own keep in mind that I was 15 then so I am almost 40 years old now so we are talking about you know more than 20 years now already okay but then fortunately I had this friend who took English courses formally who took English classes formally uh he was enrolled at a language school at an English school and um I kind of made a

deal with him you know I I asked him to lend me his old course books because every semester he would change the books the school would change the book so the deal was uh once he was done with one semester he would lend me the old course books that he wasn't going to need anymore because he had already used them so that's how I started learning I started studying English with books actually with course books and I remember that he also lent me a grammar book which was really thick really large I think it was

uh a grammar book by Azar or azer if I remember correctly and it was super helpful to me back in the day so I started with the course books I would grab a a notebook you know and then I would read the grammar units or the lesson units I would take notes of the words I would read the sentences I would read these books also had exercises so I would do the exercises so that's how I started and I was really f focused back then because I would dedicate one hour per day to do that

so one hour per day including weekends I would study English with the books um every day you know one hour per day that was my my thing and I started with a lot of input so I started reading a lot and writing a lot uh I remember that that alone was fascinating to me already because I was using another language I remember that the the simple fact that I was reading something in English from a book and coping what I was reading and writing things in English just that was already enough to get me excited

about it I was super happy already because I was like oh look at me I am reading in English and I'm writing in English so if this can teach us anything I would say celebrate your small wins celebrate your small victories because learning English uh is a series of little victories that you have it's a series of small victories so it's important that you celebrate those small victories those small wins for example if you are able to remember a word that you studied and learned recently and you were able to remember that and use that

maybe in a class great be happy for yourself celebrate that win if you uh have just finished talking to a native speaker at a coffee shop for like two or three minutes celebrate that if you understood something from a movie or TV show celebrate that so it's really important for you to celebrate your small victories and back then for me just reading and writing in English was already a small win it was already a small victory to me when it comes to my speaking abilities my speaking skills came much much later because I didn't have

anybody to practice my speaking skills with and um I was mainly focused on input as well because think about it guys how how can you expect to produce language to speak a language if you don't have the input first you need some input first so I think the natural course of events is usually like that I'm talking about when you are um especially learning English uh as an adult or a young adult okay usually we start with a lot of input even as a kid now that I think about it right I mean what does

a kid do for the first two years the kid only listens to English right that's just input input input input yeah and then at around two years the kid starts to uh speak some basic phrases some simple sentences and that's not very different from the way uh we learn languages as adults first we need a lot of input and then we start to produce more language we start to uh communicate some ideas even in a simple way and that's how it goes right but in my case the lack of opportunity to speak with people that

was a factor so the first three years of my journey I didn't speak at all or or or I spoke very little actually so Mo those first three years years were spent mostly studying with course books and grammar books one positive side of that I would say is that that gave me a very good foundation of the language a very good understanding of the language of the grammar of how English is structured and how to use the different constructions you know so um I don't regret that because I I I feel I feel like that

was a very good foundation and sometimes I would try to speak what I was reading from the course books out loud and my speaking was terrible back then because it's funny um when I read the sentences there the information silently to myself in my mind I was reading super fluently you know but when I tried to actually voice those words on the paper and speak them out loud suddenly I felt like a child speaking you know like um I wasn't sure of how to pronounce the words I didn't know if the word laugh was low

or Louch or I don't know I didn't know how to pronounce the words and uh I felt very insecure because I didn't know the correct way to pronounce the words individually and also to connect the Sounds in sentences I didn't know about connected speech back then it was something that I figured out on my own yeah many years later you know but I was still enjoying the process because learning English was something that I really wanted to do and I was having fun doing it so that's why I didn't give up even though I had

these um frustrating moments from time to time so another lesson here guys is aside from celebrating your small wins be prepared to be frustrated be prepared get ready to feel some frustration in our journey because it's normal you are learning a new skill it's not a very easy skill to acquire it's something that takes time and you will naturally have some bumps in the road you will naturally encounter some challenges you will feel frustrated sometimes even demotivated but it's important that you keep going something else I would say as a lesson here is make sure

you are curious about English make sure you develop this curiosity about the language um when I started to try to speak the words out loud like I just shared with you I instantly realized that the English language was very different from my first language from my native language Brazilian Portuguese especially when it came to making the sounds and pronunciation so this is also something that you have to keep in mind be curious about the language and try to understand how different English is from your native language it's important you have a flexible attitude towards learning

English don't be resistant don't resist the process what I see sometimes in some students is they can be a little bit resistant to making some sounds for example uh let's say the th for example the th the th sound as in thank you and theth sound as in father or mother okay in my first language we don't actually have this kind of sound we don't do this thing with our tongue you know we don't place our tongue between our teeth and we have this th sound or the sound so naturally for a typical Brazilian that

sound would be a little bit weird or strange or funny to make you would feel a little bit odd like oh this is so uncomfortable but be okay with that Embrace that be flexible all right understand that you are learning English English is a sep separate language it's a different language okay it's very different from your native language whatever your native language is so be open to learning the sounds of English to learning how uh you can produce those sounds maybe you're going to have to activate certain muscles on your face uh inner mouth that

you haven't been using all your life so that's why also it's a process that takes time because in many ways learning to speak a language well is about reprogramming your brain and kind of learning to speak again learning to make sounds that maybe you've never made before in your life all right so be open be curious and flexible when it comes to learning English but then my journey really changed when I started working I started working at 18 years old I got my first job at 18 and I would say that my professional experience the

jobs that I got in my life were crucial to my English development the very first job I got at 18 was at a drugstore all right so uh it wasn't a very glamorous job as most jobs are you know and um it was basically this drugstore that was located in my hometown I am I come from s Paulo capital in Brazil it's a huge City and uh basically I had to do everything in that place you know I minded the cash register when a customer walked in I had to help the customer uh get whatever

product the customer was looking for for when we didn't have many customers in the shop I would dust you know dust off the the shelves organize the medication the products there sometimes um the truck full of products will come you know with new stock and then you know I would unload the truck carry those boxes upstairs to the storage you know that kind of thing so I did pretty much everything um in that drugstore but one thing that was let's say unique or special about that drugstore was that that drugstore was located in a rich

neighborhood in s Paulo my hometown it was a place that was full of tourists there were many hotels around and also when tourists would visit S Paulo they would stay around there in the hotels nearby and obviously that drugstore was one of the places these tourists would go sometimes to buy medication to buy whatever they needed and since I was known among my peers at the drugstore as the English guy because I was studying English every day all the time you know my colleagues sometimes would uh go upstairs to the kitchen and they would see

me having my lunch and you know having the grammar book open there and studying with it and doing some exercises so quickly I became known as the English guy there and nobody else again knew any English in that drug store so anytime a foreign customer or a tourist walked in I was the one to be called my colleagues will say hey shagu there's a there's a gringo there yeah there's a foreign person there go help that person because you are the only person here the only guy who studies English and who knows some English so

in a way that was very nice uh in my development it was really useful because I started to have these short interactions with these customers and I remember that I had a little bit of a script already in my mind I would always uh tell them something along the lines of oh I've been learning English now I've been studying English for two years or three years whatever it was and I love the English Language by the way what do you think of my English do you have any feedback to give me so I used to

do that all the time with those customers I always ask them for feedback and this is another lesson guys that I can share here with you sometimes we might feel insecure about something because we don't have enough feedback or enough constructive or positive feedback so that's why I believe that it's important for you to have maybe a teacher who can help you with that who can give you regular uh feedback on your progress on your English if you can't afford private classes or a course maybe try to find a friend or try to find somebody

who speaks English already who is more experienced as an English speaker than you and from time to time ask that person for feedback so it's really important that you get feedback both positive and constructive because then that's going to keep um that's going to keep you motivated to keep learning and to keep you uh to keep studying all right so I worked at this drugstore for almost two years and uh I wasn't speaking English all the time there or every day but from time to time I would get these opportunities to speak for a little

while with a native speaker or with a foreigner that was already great but then I got my second job and my second job was crucial in my English development I would say because it was a second job was a job as a uh customer service representative basically it was a job at a call center and um I was supposed to help clients solve their cable TV problems it was a job that was fully in English and the job was about this there was this American company in the US that provided cable TV services but whenever

an American customer there had a problem with his or her cable TV service you know I don't know for some reason the TV is not working they will call us we were in s Paulo you know they will call the support desk us for help so basically the job was about talking to the customer uh checking the customer's account to see if the customer had paid the bill because sometimes the cable got disconnected simply because the person hadn't paid the bill or sometimes we had to walk the person through some troubleshooting steps you know uh

we would ask the person to unplug the cable box connect it again wait 10 seconds turn it back on see if it works that kind of thing so we will help the customer via the phone with these instructions and then if the service was still you know down we would schedule a technician's visit it through the system so that an American technician there could go to the person's place and fix the cable TV so that was pretty much what the job involved and entailed and that was a great experience for me because I stayed there

for about a year and that meant that I was talking to Americans on the phone six hours a day six days a week for almost a year all right so from Monday to Saturday Saturday 6 hours each day that was my job to answer phone calls from the US talking to Americans and trying to help them solve their cable problems all right that experience helped uh me a lot when it came to developing my listening skills and also my speaking skills my pronunciation skills it was almost like an exchange program of a year but without

having to travel and without having to spend any money because I was actually working so I was actually getting paid to have these uh let's say this immersion yeah so that was really really interesting but you see guys uh I only got that job because I already spoke English I already knew some English just combining what I have been doing before studying for a few years with course books grammar books and then talking to customers at the drugstore from time to time only doing that and practicing my speaking skills alone was already enough for me

to get this second job which was fully in English you see so don't underestimate the power of studying by yourself and practicing your speaking by yourself because it works it really works and I would also say if you are trying to improve your English for work don't feel intimidated or scared to apply for jobs and positions because sometimes you might be intimidated because you look at the job descript destion and the job description says oh we need someone with fluent English or with Advanced English and then because of that you don't apply you have all

the other qualifications but you don't feel like you have that fluent Advanced English so you don't apply what I would tell you is apply any way apply and see what happens if you are already at an intermediate level if you can understand English already and if you can communicate somewhat apply and see what happens I mean the know you already have so I think having this bold attitude is also important that's why that is something that I always had and I would say that it helped me a lot maybe if I didn't have this confidence

in myself I wouldn't have applied for that job because I would have thought that my English wasn't good enough you see so that's another lesson that I can share here okay apply any way be more confident in yourself and see what happens and then around this time when I was working you know uh at the drugstore and then at the call center I was between 18 and 19 years old that was the time when I really started to immerse myself in English because before yes I was studying with books and stuff but I didn't have

a lot of immersion yet so that was the time when I started to watch everything in English we had DVDs back then we didn't have Netflix or anything like that so that's that that was when I started to watch DVDs in English with the audio in English the subtitles in English uh I started to read more in English so I made sure that everything around me everything within my power I would change the the language you know I would switch it to English so I had my first cell phone for you to have an idea

at 18 years old yeah guys so I have my first cell phone when I was 18 and the first thing I did was switch the language of my device to English and that's how I did you know computers TV every device in my home that I could change the language to I would change the language to English because I wanted to simulate the experience of living abroad I wanted to simulate this immersion since I didn't have the chance or the money to travel I wanted to simulate this experience of being in touch or exposed to

English as much as I could so with a little bit of creativity and tenacity I would say you can make it happen all right so make sure you create your own immersion experience you don't have to wait until you travel abroad you don't have to wait until you go on that Exchange program to be fully exposed to the language especially nowadays nowadays we have the internet we have apps we have so much more that can help us uh create this emerging experience you know so don't use that as an excuse all right so you can

create your own immersion in English from your home country just be a little bit creative with that and use all the technological resources that you have available today still talking about my own immersion experience um I would do things like for example if I were at the doctor's office waiting to be you know a seen or if I were uh stuck in traffic or walking on the street or going to work I would have conversations with myself you know I would describe mentally I would mentally describe what was what I was seeing on the street

you know something like oh I see there are two people here they are walking their dog there's another woman there she's running I guess she's exercising you see so I would have these little conversations in my head in my mind just to practice the language all right it sounds kind of crazy but it works all right and I am living proof that it works okay something else that I used to do back then was sometimes I would go to a coffee shop you know I was working already so I was making a little money so

I would go to a Starbucks or to a coffee shop and then sometimes I would see a tourist there you know in line or something I would always make sure that I talk to that tourist at least for a little bit I would start the conversation with something like excuse me uh you're not from here are you and the person would say oh no no I am from the US or I am from Canada you know whatever place the person was from then I would have a little conversation like oh that's great I'm Cho nice

to meet you what's your name oh that's cool I mean uh are you enjoying Brazil and then the person would answer uh my question and then I would say again the same little script oh by the way I've been studying English for two or three years now I love the language why do you think of my English is it okay so these little simple quick interactions guys maybe they don't seem much individually speaking but if you do that a lot if you do that often so many positive things happen yeah you gain constant feedback you

feel more confident in your speaking and talking to people and you improve remember it's a process and then still talking about my professional experience I would say that becoming a teacher was the definitive thing or experience that took my English to the next level because I became a teacher at the age of 21 I was super young so right after that call center experience I became a teacher and I never stopped so now it's been over 15 years that I have been an English teacher and teaching English has also helped me improve my language abilities

because I always say that when you teach is like you are learning again because before you teach a class you have to prepare that class so you have to to study the content that you are about to present you have to think of examples you could give to your students you have to think of different ways to say the same thing or to explain a topic or a point and this mental workout let's say is really beneficial to internalize the language even more all right and when I started teaching obviously I started teaching beginners I

started teaching basic levels because I wasn't confident enough yet in my English and I didn't even have the English skills yet to teach more intermediate and advanced Learners back then so I started with beginners but then with time as my English got better and better and my teaching skills got better and better I started to work with higher levels at schools you know more intermediate levels more advanced levels and nowadays that's all I do actually nowadays I only focus on intermediate and advanced learners especially for my uh private classes right but that experience of teaching

was really useful uh another thing that I remember something really cool that also happened when I started teaching English was that I started to being in touch or en Conta with more experienced teachers you know teachers who were 15 20 years older than me who have been teaching English their entire lives and who spoke amazing English these teach teers were amazing communicators they had great pronunciation great domain of grammatical structures they communicated like a boss all right and I had the privilege to work with some of these teachers and they helped me tremendously I always

tell this story that was this teacher in one of the first schools I worked at we were having this conversation one day she was maybe 15 or 20 years older than me then I said the word basic I said basic and then she she said you know Chago if you don't mind me correcting you the pronunciation of the word is basic with an S sound not z sound it's not basic but basic all right and then I remember that I was like blown away I was like what I mean I've been speaking basic all my

life for years now and now you're telling me that it's not basic it's basic and then she said yeah and then she went on to explain to me that usually in English nouns and adjectives that have the letter s are pronounced with an S sound so the word basic is an adjective so the S there has the S sound basic now words in English that have the S sound but there are verbs tend to be pronounced with a z sound so for example the verb close you see you close the door that's a verb so

the ass there should have the sound of Z you close the door but we also have the adjective close for example I live close to work or I live close to you so since this is an adjective now the as here has an S sound so close versus close this is one example of more nuanced details that I learned in the language simply by being in contact with more experienced teachers so another lesson here is be open to feedback especially constructive feedback back because if somebody takes the time to correct your English to correct something

you say be thankful for that be appreciative of that because that person cares enough to stop whatever it is they're doing and correct you so don't feel inferior or bad about it if somebody corrects your English actually be thankful be grateful that that person is trying to help and guys like I said I have been teaching English now for so many years and throughout my life as a teacher later I was able to take proficiency exams like the Cambridge exams in 2008 I got the Cambridge Advanced certificate that's the C1 level certificate it was around

maybe four or five years after I started to study English and then a few years later I got to take the Cambridge C2 certificate of proficiency in English again that's the last level a non-native speaker can achieve in terms of proficiency so it is a really difficult test by the way it's not everybody who is able to pass like that you you really have to study for it you have to prepare for it but it is a good Testament of all the hard work of all the the the effort that you've put in learning a

language so now um I feel very fortunate to be in this position where I get to create content like this you know podcasts videos social Med media post to help people learn English because now I have this knowledge and this expertise not not just the the knowledge itself of the language but also the knowledge to teach the language right and um I feel fortunate I feel happy to be in this position now where I can contribute forward I can pay AFF forward I can help other people achieve as high of a level as they can

all right and that's a little bit about my story that's a little bit about my journey everything that I did and that happened to me so that I could get to this level of English I have today and to be honest with you I am still learning guys because the learning never stops and the learning should never stop look at learning as something that is lifelong that's why we call it lifelong learning okay so to this day sometimes I learn a new word a new expression that I had no idea about or sometimes I learned

how to pronounce a word maybe I have been mispronouncing a word all these years and then I learned the right way to pronounce it and then I was like oh yeah oh my God okay that's great you see so the learning never stops and that's my story thank you so much for listening again make sure you follow the show so you don't miss a single new episode every week there will be a new episode here on the podcast and if you like this episode if you like this idea of improving your English to get to

a higher level make sure you help me by leaving a five star review on Spotify or apple podcast wherever you are listening and if you are here on YouTube like the video subscribe to the channel and also leave a comment let me know what you thought about my story and about this episode all right again if you're interested in having private classes with me the link for that is in the description or in the show notes just go to the page learn more about it and apply if you are interested all right guys thank you

so much and I'll be talking to you very soon